Some weeks ago, Greg Shupak noted how the extremity of the violence unleashed during Operation Protective Edge led some to describe Israel’s actions as “irrational.”

They were wrong. A settler-colonial state, Israel’s existence depended first on the forced exodus of Palestinians and then the repeated destruction of their attempts at self-organization.

Israel isn’t unique in this respect. The so-called Black War between colonists and indigenous people in Eastern Tasmania offers another example, one that makes a productive (though obviously not exact) comparison with Gaza, both because it’s less well known to those in the Global North, but also because a raft of recent historiography has thrown fresh light on what settler colonization meant for the island the British originally called Van Diemen’s Land.